Notably, it wasn’t two Black women who kept Bernie from speaking in Seattle. It was a White man, a Bernie supporter, who organized the event who shut it down, said the event was over, and informed the crowd that Sanders would not be speaking because he couldn’t agree with the “methods of direct action” of the Black women in front of him.

Respectability politics definitely play a role here. The argument goes: If these loud, destructive, rude protesters would only mellow out, they'd realize that you catch more flies with honey. Don't upset or alienate your white allies. Don't piss on your best friend. Don't put your best friend in a compromising position. He can't help you until he gets on the inside. So be nice, play fair, and wait your turn. You're making black people look bad.

Two Black women called for a moment of silence for Mike Brown a year after he was gunned down, left bleeding in the street for 4.5 hours, and White “progressives” shouted, booed, and chanted the name of a White man throughout that moment.How much more committed to a “negative peace” can we get than literally shouting down the memory of a Black youth whose murder helped to spark this movement?And how much more “devoted to ‘order'” can we be than to lecture Black people about what direct actions are and are not “hurting your cause”? (Notably, this language I’ve seen from countless White folks shows that we do not see the cause of racial justice as OUR cause – it’s that cause over there that we will tolerate so long as it doesn’t disrupt our Bernie rally.)And how much more of a “stumbling block” can our self-proclaimed “allyship” be to racial justice when it’s so feeble as to proclaim, “I am a strong ally of the Black Lives Matter movement, but I’m not sure how to be an ally when they are this disrespectful to the only candidate that has actually done anything for minorities” (actual quote from one of the 15 or so social media threads I’m following as I write this article)?

Black Lives Matter is not a moment, it's a movement. A movement created by three strong, black, bold, intelligent, brave, young women. They are our hope for the future of our republic. EYE stand by them and with them all the darn way, all the darn day. As much as it pains me to quote Dubya, you're either with us, or you're against us.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.~Frederick Douglas

Sanders needs to, as the young people say, get some of his supporters in check, before they drive more supporters like me away.

2 comments:

I don't agree with what the Sanders supporters are saying, but I understand why they are not happy with BLM-Seattle. They were there to see Sanders, not be lectured. And the two ladies are lucky that they were not arrested by security. That is what usually happens to people that rush a stage. And in a way that is a failure of the security there. There was no way for security to know what those ladies were going to do.

Disruptions are not going to win people over to your side. At best it gets you on the news and you might get some people to you side that way. But the crowd is going to be against you.

They set up a confrontation with Bernie Sanders, with the crowd, and they got what they wanted.

Notably, it wasn’t two Black women who kept Bernie from speaking in Seattle. It was a White man, a Bernie supporter, who organized the event who shut it down, said the event was over, and informed the crowd that Sanders would not be speaking because he couldn’t agree with the “methods of direct action” of the Black women in front of him.

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